By 6:45 every morning, Sylvester Williams is on the StairMaster, with every sweat-drenched step driving him toward a lofty place in the 2013 NFL Draft.

For those who knew North Carolina’s star defensive tackle as a high school sophomore in Jefferson City, Mo., that’s almost impossible to believe. It’s not that Williams was a “bad kid,” but his priorities didn’t exactly include early mornings or self-discipline. He didn’t play football until his senior year—and even then, he wasn’t very good—and his high school academic transcript was dreadful.

Now? “He’s the first one in the building,” North Carolina quarterback Bryn Renner says. “I’m like, ‘Sly, man, what are you doing?’ And he’s like, ‘Nothing, man. Gotta get better.’ He’s so humble about it.”

That Williams has anything to be humble about speaks to his remarkable journey—and the generous souls who helped a likeable, though oft-distracted, teenager, made him this way.

'I had high points ... I had low points'

Williams went to class twice, maybe three times, a week that second year of high school. His focus wasn’t on grades. It was about earning enough money to buy a car, and he had his eyes on a Tahoe or a 1987 Cutlass Supreme. His job at Backyard Burgers, then Taco Bell, took precedent. When Williams worked the 3 a.m. closing shift, there was little chance he’d get up and go to school.

One morning, his father—also named Sylvester—decided he’d had enough of Williams’ apathetic school habits. When he woke up to find his truant son still asleep, he made a phone call.

“About 10 minutes later, the police came knocking on the door,” Williams says. “So he told them, ‘Man, I keep telling him to go to school and he doesn’t want to go. He don’t understand that he ain’t going to be able to make it without going to school.’ So the police officer took me to school, let me ride in the front seat and dropped me off right in front of the door.”

That should have been the turning point in Williams’ life, the wake-up call that finally put him on the path to success.

It wasn’t.

A few weeks later, Williams was kicked out of school for poor attendance.

“Growing up,” he says matter-of-factly, “I had high points in life, and I had low points.”

'I want to do the right thing'

He’s not quite sure when his mom slipped out of the picture. “I was old enough to remember her being there, but after that she took some bad paths in her life,” he says. “We never had a chance to be around her growing up as much as I wanted to.”

As a kid, Williams lived in an apartment in South St. Louis with his father, his older sisters Sylia and Sylvia and his younger brother, Cedric, with his mother showing up “every once in a while.” His aunt, Clarinda Hutson, did her best to provide a motherly influence in her sister’s absence; she would take the kids shopping for clothes and school supplies and those sorts of things.

His father, a factory worker from the time he was 19, was a tough-love type who was more likely to punish his son for not saying “Yes, sir,” than give him a hug. In 2004, health issues—high blood pressure and heart problems—forced him into an extended hospital stay, and then other demons landed him in rehab.

At the time, Sylia was attending Lincoln University in Jefferson City, so the two brothers moved halfway across the state to live with her just before the start of Williams’ freshman year. His father, with a cleaner bill of health, and sister Sylvia followed them to Jefferson City toward the end of the school year.

It could have been a fresh start for the young kid.

A self-proclaimed hoopster, he played basketball for the Jays’ freshman team. But he was kicked off at the end of the fall semester because of bad grades, and the same thing happened his sophomore year. Potential was being plucked away by apathy toward school and everyone around him could see it.

Football was never in the mix, either, despite all of the reasons it probably should have been.

Legendary Jeff City coach Pete Adkins won 405 games and nine state championships with the Jays, and Friday nights remained holy in Missouri’s state capital long after he retired in 1994. Sylvester Sr., who played nose guard for Normandy High in St. Louis in the late 1970s, tried everything to get his boy to share in his love for the game.

“He took me out to the field and said, ‘If you put those pads on and you hit somebody and you don’t like it, you’ve never got to play again,’ ” Williams says. His father even introduced him to the Jeff City coaches before his sophomore year; they told Williams practice started the next day.

He didn’t show up.

After he was expelled, his principal suggested enrolling in an alternative school would probably be his best option. His dad told him to get his GED and move on with life.

“But I told him, ‘Dad, I want to go back to school. I want to do the right thing. I want to go back to school and graduate the right way,’ ” he says. “That’s what I decided to do.”

Back in school the next year, his friends, now juniors, were playing big roles on the varsity, so Williams went to just about every game. He talked with the new football coaching staff—Ted LePage and his assistants took over for the 2006 season—about the possibility of playing as a senior.

That spring, as Williams tried to find a more academic-friendly balance to school and work, the coaches took a more active role in his development. LePage and assistants Mark Thomas, Lerone Briggs and Barry Blank started giving him rides to and from school, in part to help him get ready for the season, but also just to make sure he was going to class.

“He was very personable, very likeable,” says Thomas, who now is the head coach at Belton High near Kansas City. “He was a very respectful kid, very appreciative of anything and everything you did for him.”

The early morning workouts started at 6, with weightlifting sessions after school.

“So I was obviously on time every day then,” Williams says, “and that helped me out a lot.”

Life finally started to smooth out. That is, until one potentially disastrous backslide during finals week. Williams had to pass Thomas’ PE final to be eligible for football, but he wasn’t in class.

“For some reason I decided I didn’t want to go to school that day,” Williams says. “I guess it was just the old me coming out again.”

So Thomas called LePage, told him the situation, and the head coach immediately took off. LePage got Williams to class in time to take the final, which he passed.

“That just shows the great people I had behind me,” Williams says. “I had never played for this coach, had really just met him a couple months ago, and he shows up at my door like that.”

Sometimes, it takes a village.

'I can play this game'

His story isn’t one of instant stardom.

“He was a diamond in the rough,” Thomas says. “But his first year, there was a lot of rough that needed to be knocked off of him to get him to the level we were playing.”

Williams was 6-3, 290 pounds with plenty of raw athletic ability, but he had very little idea how to use his hands and too often he would come off the ball standing straight up. He started one game and finished with 21 total tackles and one sack for the 8-2 Jays.

The structure provided by football worked wonders. He found classes easier to pass when he actually attended them regularly. Williams finally played his first full season of basketball as a senior—he relished every minute—and graduated with his class that spring.

The day after graduation, Williams quit Taco Bell. He worked at Wal-Mart for a while before starting at Modine Manufacturing Company, a “real job,” in early August. For a 19-year-old kid in Jefferson City, $400 a week made for a very healthy paycheck.

He worked with the machines that made radiator parts for large trucks, he swept the floors and he did quality control checks. Time would drag, especially on the days he stood in the same spot for eight hours. Working a stationary job, away from the motivation of football, his weight crept up dramatically.

And the bells that sounded for his two 15-minute breaks and his 30-minute lunch were constant, grating reminders of his voluntary confinement. The idea of hearing those every day for the next 40 years was a chilling thought.

And the more college football he watched on Saturdays, the more he thought about getting back to the sport he’d only tasted.

“I’d work eight hours, and six of them, I was thinking about college football, just realizing that’s what I really wanted to do,” Williams says. “I didn’t know if I’d be good, but I knew I wanted to play more football.”

Williams often talked about his future with Andre Salmon, a physical education instructor and strength coach at the high school. Salmon, a football and basketball athlete in his college days, was Williams’ basketball coach shortly after he moved to town, and he became a mentor and motivator for Williams.

“The relationship he and I built, we had a lot of talks about how things were not going to be easy, as far as him stepping into something,” Salmon says. “It had to be about what his goals are, about believing and knowing that he would have support from me and his family, whatever path he decides to take.”

Williams and Salmon took a trip to the Texas Tech-Kansas football game in Lawrence, Kan., on Oct. 25, 2008. A couple of amazing things happened that day: First, the Red Raiders scored nine mind-boggling touchdowns in a 63-21 road rout of KU, and second, Williams had a revelation. His friend from Jeff City, Richard Johnson, was a freshman on that Kansas squad, and when they went down after the game to meet up with him, Williams noticed that, with a few exceptions, he was the same size as the players coming out of the locker room.

They’d looked much bigger on television.

“I was like, ‘Man, I can play this game,’ ” he says.

'Who told him he could come here'

Williams was taking a giant leap of faith, showing up at the Coffeyville Community College football offices unannounced and uninvited.

The five-hour drive from Jefferson City to this small, football-centric town in southeast Kansas had provided plenty of time for doubts, hopes and questions to bounce around in his mind. The longer he thought he had deviated from the MapQuest directions his aunt printed for him, the more lost he felt—physically and emotionally.

Then, he passed a glorious road sign: Coffeyville, 51 miles.

“I saw that and knew I was going the right way,” Williams says.

Ironically, Williams was heading to Coffeyville only because he was ignoring another pretty obvious sign: Head coach Darian Dulin had flat-out told Williams not to show up.

After that trip to the Texas Tech-Kansas game, Williams decided, with plenty of counsel from Salmon and Williams’ family, that Coffeyville was the place for him. His initial thought was to walk on at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, a Division II school, but he would have been academically ineligible initially. That wasn’t the case at a junior college.

And, there was at least the possibility of scholarship money if things worked out. So they sent tape of Williams’s lone season to the Coffeyville coaches. In retrospect, that wasn’t the best idea.

“My film was so bad they just stopped, said, ‘We don’t want this guy,’ ” he says.

Williams went to Coffeyville anyway and walked into Dulin’s office shortly after arriving on campus. Dulin was shocked to see him.

“I got upset at our coaches when he showed up,” he says. “I was like, ‘Who told him he could come here?’ ”

Turns out that assistant coach Keith Wilson, knowing the shortage of big bodies on the Red Ravens’ roster, secretly encouraged Williams to show up. At the walk-on tryouts, Williams lugged his now 370-pound frame through the 20-yard dash, the bench press and every other position drill on the field.

He showed enough raw ability to make the team, sans anything other than minimal expectations. At best, Dulin figured, Williams could improve enough to help on the scout team. At worst, he would provide a big body for his starters to beat on during practice.

Williams spent the next several months transforming his body—and Dulin’s perception. He went to every practice and every voluntary workout, and he soaked up every ounce of technique coaching offered, with an ever-appreciative attitude. By the time fall practice rolled around, he was down to 315 pounds, and Dulin put him on scholarship.

The physical aspect of losing weight was important, but the tangible evidence of accomplishing his goal was intoxicating. So when Williams found out that three former top-rated prep defensive line recruits were arriving—D’Angelo McCray (Illinois), Tony Gillespie (Kansas State) and Robert Thomas (Arkansas)—he attacked the starting job the same way, and he beat everyone out.

“I’ve never been around anything like it,” Dulin says. “Everything was just exceptional. He took pride in working hard and getting himself in shape, and once he made the team, there was no denying he was our leader for the next two years.”

Oklahoma State was the first BCS school to extend an offer; that arrived early in 2010. He was so excited that coaches had to talk him out of immediately accepting. They preached patience, and sure enough, more offers rolled in. The attention intensified during his sophomore season—he had 11½ tackles for loss, four blocked kicks, two sacks and a forced fumble; he was named first team KJCCC All-Conference, first-team All-Region and a was an honorable mention NJCAA All-American.

Williams took official recruiting trips to Baylor, North Carolina, Oklahoma State, Southern California and Ole Miss. He heard from just about everyone else—Auburn, Georgia, Missouri, Kansas State and Memphis, to name a few. The trip to North Carolina in November was his second official visit, and though the Tar Heels lost to Virginia Tech that day, he knew he would wind up in Chapel Hill.

It felt like home.

'You've got to take chances'

Tell anyone at North Carolina that Sylvester Williams only started one game during his high school career, or that he was legitimately afraid he would be cut as a juco walk-on, and they’ll find that almost impossible to believe.

“If North Carolina saw his high school tape,” Dulin says with a laugh, “they’d probably be embarrassed he’s there, honestly.”

The Tar Heels returned four starters on the defensive line in 2011, but Williams won a spot anyway and wound up being one of only four defensive players to start all 13 games. He finished with 54 total tackles, seven tackles for loss, 2½ sacks, an interception, a fumble recovery and a forced fumble. After the season, he was pleasantly surprised when NFL scouts gave him a second-round draft grade, based on his game tape.

But he opted against the NFL. If, he figured, he received a second-round grade after just one year at UNC—and, really, just four years of football—with a little more improvement, the first round was a legitimate possibility.

Through the first two games of the season, he has 2½ sacks and 2½ tackles for loss.

Through what has been a tumultuous time for UNC football because of NCAA investigations, Williams has become a standard-bearer in new coach Larry Fedora’s program.

“If a recruit’s going to come on campus, we want Sly to be with him because of his personality, because of how much he loves the university and because of what he stands for,” Fedora says. “He’s going to do things the right way.”

He does things the right way, in large part, because of his support system. He talks with Salmon all the time. Same thing with his father and his siblings, and Williams finally has a relationship with his mom, Melanie Carter.

“I talk to her every week,” he says. “I have one nephew and two nieces, and she’s there for them like she wanted to be there for us.”

An organizational communications major, he wants to be a motivational speaker after his football career.

He wants to influence kids like Salmon, Thomas, LePage, Dulin and so many others influenced him.

“I tell everybody now, in life, you’ve got to take chances,” Williams says. “If you don’t take chances, you’ll always be saying, ‘What if?’ I didn’t want that. Had I went to Coffeyville and gotten cut, I wouldn’t have lost any sleep. I would have gone home and tried to go to school there. Just the fact I went was enough.”

So, the kid who was kicked off his high school basketball team for bad grades—twice—and then expelled for poor attendance will graduate from college in four years. The kid who was so bad a juco coach told him to stay home likely will be a first-round pick in the 2013 NFL Draft.

“What Sylvester has been able to accomplish after high school has just been amazing, really,” Thomas says.

This kid, the one who almost never got started, has become the man who is nowhere near finished. Amazing, indeed.